Ologies with Alie Ward - Ludology (VIDEO GAMES) with Jane McGonigal

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Video games! Tabletop games! IRL role-play gaming! The ... lottery? Dr. Jane McGonigal is a video game developer, TED speaker, bestselling author and total badass with a deep knowledge of how games -- and especially video games -- can motivate, soothe and connect us. We talk about everything from Monopoly to dance offs, Fortnite, vintage Atari, VR, the challenge of Dark Souls, the sweetness of League of Legends, how Tetris can get you through rough times and the health issue that caused Dr. McGonigal to create her huge hit, SuperBetter. Also: why everyone who loves games and everyone who hates games should hear this.JaneMcGonigal.comDr. Jane McGonigal on Twitter: @AvantgameSponsor links: TakeCareof.com (code: OLOGIES50), LinkedIn.com/Ologies, StitchFix.com/ologiesThis week's donation was made to AbleGamers.orgMore links at alieward.com/ologies/ludologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's the lady sitting in the middle seat who has to get up to pee, but you're in the window seat and you're so relieved she does, because that means you don't have to ask again the aisle to get up. Allie Ward, back with another episode of oligies. Oh, video games. Video games, what's their deal? How do they affect our brains? Have we got an ology for y'all?

Okay, first, I do have some thanks. Thanks to everyone who's pledging some of your latte money or tossing me a quarter a week on Patreon for making it possible for me to get my physical butt in the same space as theologous, or in this case, to pay a recording studio to do our first ever remote interview. Very exciting. Thanks to everyone sporting ologies merch out in the wild. That's at ologiesmerch.com, t-shirts, hats, pins, all of that. Thank you to everyone who rates and subscribes and reviews, and you leave such nice notes.

For example, Naemon says, I love this podcast so much, I found it when searching for podcasts to help me sleep. Sadly, I found a podcast to binge and stay up even later. Thank you, Allie Ward, for the podcast that has everything from biology to beauty. I never did solve my sleeping problem, but I don't really mind anymore, so thank you for the podcast. Well, thanks for the review. Try the fancy Nancy.

Just lay in bed. You think of a category, and then you think of something that starts with an A, and a B, and a C. If you didn't listen to this Leap episode, that's in part two of this Leap episode, and it's named after my very fancy mom, Fancy Nancy, who came up with it. Anyway, back to Lodology. Who's excited? We all are, so Lodology.

Let's get right into it, pals. It's a real word. It means the study of games, and it comes from the Latin ludare, meaning to play. Yay. It was coined sometime around the 1950s. It didn't mean video games back then because time machines had not yet been invented, but nowadays it can encompass gameplay and sports and cards, of course, bebop video games. Thisologist has been bee-booping in my periphery for years.

My sister told me about her TED talk, and she was discussing her games super better that can help folks who are healing from an illness or going through anxiety or depression. I've been a fan of hers for years, and I reached out to her. I chewed my fingernails, waiting for a response. She said she was down to record, but our schedules just couldn't get aligned. So finally, I took the plunge. She ducked into a recording studio in Berkeley. We taped this remotely, you guys, and it wasn't awkward.

She says so good. She has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in performance studies, and she's designed games since 2003. So she taught game design and game theory at UC Berkeley in the San Francisco Art Institute. She's been named as one of the 20 most inspiring women in the world by this lady named Oprah in a magazine called Oprah, and she's a speaker. She's author of the book, Reality is Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, and New York Times bestseller Super Better, a revolutionary approach to getting

stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient, and she's the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. She's legit. So I was so nervous before taping this because she's just high badass. She couldn't have been more affable and great. We chatted about IRL games, board games, animosity, Fortnite, the line between play and addiction, League of Legends, gambling, lottery tickets, off-brand Atari, what Tetris does to the brain, video games and violence, should kids play games?

We talked about aliens, soup, and how games can change your life for the Super Better. So let's press start on a truly life-changing conversation with letologist Dr. Jane McGonagall. Hi, Allie. Hi, Jane. How are you? I'm great. I'm so excited to talk to you in person. Let me unzip my jacket so I don't, it might make sense.

Okay. I'm going to take that off. That'll be better. All right. So, hi. First off, Dr. McGonagall. It's lovely to talk to you. You could also call me Professor McGonagall for all the Harry Potter fans out there.

Oh, my God. Does that happen a lot? Yes. When that character started to exist, it made my life so much more fun. The sorting ceremony will begin momentarily. Do people spell it right now? No, not at all, but they pronounce it correctly, which never happened growing up, so it has helped a lot.

And I do have questions starting right off. Growing up, you have a twin sister. Did you guys grow up playing a bunch of board games? How do twin sisters pass the time? Well, okay. So, first of all, we should talk about board games, definitely during this interview, because some new research came out showing that normal board games are really bad for your relationships, like they lower your oxytocin levels.

So, we do have memories growing up playing board games, but we always fought at the end of them. And, you know, I never, do you remember like games like Sorry, where you would, you know, mercilessly take out other people's pieces and move them to the beginning of the game? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Monopoly, where like one person gets power and then lords it over everybody else for an increasingly unfun hour.

Yeah, traditional board games are poorly designed for social interactions and are terrible for you. And so, yes, I do have memories growing up playing with them. Unfortunately, my sister never recovered from those early experiences and would never play like video games or anything else with me after that. But yeah. And now, I mean, literally just a couple weeks ago, I saw this study showing that traditional board games lower oxytocin levels, like you trust each other less.

And it makes perfect sense because the games are, as a game designer, I can point out all of the ways that they are poorly designed to, you know, lead to negative social experiences rather than positive ones, the old school ones. The new ones are better. Oh, my God, that validates so much because I remember even when you would win at Monopoly, you'd feel bad because you were hosing everyone in your family. Yes. You're like, I'm an asshole.

I'm like such a slumlord right now. What do I do? No, and I don't know. I think people maybe know this now, but Monopoly was originally designed as a pedagogical tool to teach people the evils of capitalism and it was supposed to make you feel bad. You were supposed to play it and say, wow, this is awful and terrible and let's be socialists. And so it was designed to make you feel bad. And so in that extent, it works, but playing it for fun, not a good idea.

Oh, my word. I just went down a hole on this one, quick aside. So Monopoly was actually the early 1900s brainchild of an anti-capitalist activist and she was a comedian and a writer. She was an unmarried woman, Elizabeth Maggie, and she made it as a cautionary tale. And in her old timey words, let the children see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, the evil will be remedied. Such high hopes, Lizzie, but perhaps the irony was just too lost on us.

And that's why a land baron who shits in a golden toilet is presiding over the nation. Anyway, so the game had a very sexy original title. It was called The Landlord's Game and Elizabeth Maggie worked her ass off on it. And then some jabroni played it at a house party and she was ripped off. She made 500 bucks. He made millions because capitalism. So when did you start liking gameplay? At what point did you start playing video games or did you start to realize it may be

designing of something you'd want to do? You know, I have some really positive early memories of my dad bringing home an odyssey, which was kind of like the knockoff cheap Atari, because we were like a knockoff cheap family growing up. And so it had like knockoff Pac-Man called Casey Munchkin that was really a bad version. Like it wasn't well designed either and it was impossible to win. But yeah, he would bring home, he brought home these cartridges and he would play with us and teach us how to get better.

And so I really positive early memories of spending time with my dad kind of learning these new games and getting better. And he taught me chess and our grandfather taught us poker and roulette at a very early age. I was like five or six learning how to play poker. So there was a lot of gameplay in my family and then we got a Commodore 64, which for computer geeks, that was like one of the first at home computers. You could learn basic programming.

And so in like fifth grade, I started making my own computer games and the very first one I ever made was called You Be the Judge. And I think it was inspired by watching a lot of divorce court and people's court on daytime TV. So you got to be the judge and also you were a cat because I had to use like ASCII art and I couldn't draw like a person that well, so I made you a cat and you had a little gavel that was animated and you would hear people's testimony and decide if they were guilty or not.

Oh my God. That's so, I watched so much people's court too, I completely remember that. Was it gratifying to you when you started, even as a kid designing games, was it gratifying to see something that you had imagined be a reality? At what point, what really got you hooked in that? It was totally the experience of having somebody sit down and play with it. I actually made board games. Also we would, my sister and I would create life-size board games in our basement because

we had this weird like 60s psychedelic tile. And so we would use each tile as like a space and you would have to like go to prom and things like that. I would have people come over and play that or I'd have people play my computer game and it was watching how people would react and did they laugh or they surprised, did they try really hard to figure something out. It was the ability to provoke I guess all of these really positive emotions and see people like try and be challenged was really interesting to me and I think through my whole life that

has been the single thing that's most interesting to me is that the greatest draw you have as a game designer is the first time people start to play with it and you're like, oh my god, I had no idea. That's what people would do. I'm going to change these 12 rules and change this constraint and re-figure you know what the goal is so that they do something different but watching people react and how it brings out good things in them and maybe things you don't want to bring out in them and you can change it.

Kind of like being a chef and changing the ingredients you're throwing in. Just a fistful of delight, maybe a sprinkle of reflective sadness. I mean after all she had a PhD in performance studies so the doc knows what's up. You also studied performance so do you feel like there's something almost like watching people watch a performance or someone watch a play or a movie that you've designed or written? Yeah, absolutely. In the same way that theater or choreography, you need a performer to make it real, right?

The script or the choreography as it's designed, when somebody embodies it, it comes to life and when different people perform a play or perform a dance or a song, they bring something different to it and express themselves through it. It's the same with a game. When you design a game or code a game, it's not real until a player comes to it and then they bring something different to it and with games you get an even wider range, I think of interpretation and expressivity and so they do very much have that kind of idea in common that people bring these artworks to life and that they are the essence.

It's actually funny when I was really, I was a theater geek also growing up so I double geek, theater geek geek geek. Jane says that when she was around 11, she saw a one woman play starring Willie Tomlin called The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which was written by Lily Tomlin's now-wife Jane Wagner and in it, one character named Trudy is a homeless woman who encounters extraterrestrials. She's trying to teach them what art is as you would do. And so she's showing them Andy Warhol paintings of soup cans and then they hold up soup cans

and they're like, is this art? And she's like, no, this is the art, this is the painting and they have this whole thing and then at the end of the play, they go to theater with the homeless lady and they forget to watch the play. They were watching the audience and all of their reactions and their laughter and their goosebumps and the aliens are like, you know, the play is soup but the audience is art. And I'm telling you, I think that's the most influential thing in my whole life I ever saw or heard because then I became obsessed with, you know, how the people who interact

with art or theater or games, they're the art. So the people are the art. And Jane says when she was first starting her PhD work, she was kind of the weirdo because everyone else was studying the games themselves but she was studying the players and how the games affected them. But I think it's good to be the weirdo because that usually means that you have an impact to make and you're the first person to be doing something. So if you ever whisper to yourself, shit, why am I such a weirdo, congratulations because

you're probably doing something right. And when did you start designing games as a job? When did it become your career? It's such a wacky road. I mean, when I was in college, I worked with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and I helped run these like really big, large-scale recreation events like an Easter egg hunt for 35,000 kids in Central Park. And I always think of that as some of my early game design work because, you know, they are

games, they're not digital, but you come out and play. And when I went to grad school, I started my PhD program at Berkeley, I was meant to be studying scientists and specifically quantum physicists and how they collaborate and how they communicate their research with the public, so not at all games. I got a side gig my first semester as a PhD student. There was a new game company in San Francisco that they wanted to essentially play games in reality. They were inspired by the Michael Douglas movie, The Game.

So, which, you know, he can't tell, is it real, is it the game? It's a bunch of actors pretending to be real people and they give admissions and his whole life is transformed and he has these amazing revelations about, you know, the meaning of everything, but also it's really confusing because the game is played in reality. So this company was like, we're going to do that, but we're going to be nice and it's going to be fun and silly and you're not going to be confused. They're still running all these reality games and you run around the city and do missions like pay phone or ring and they'll give you a code and then you'll find a box and a pile

of leaves and the code opens the box and there's a raft inside and you have to take the raft out on a lake and then you find like the snorkel equipment, you have to find something with a lot of the lake and then like there's, I mean, it's like, you know, you get to be really adventurous in reality. Anyway, they hired me and that was like, that was the beginning. That was how I earned my credentials to go to the game developers conference. I'm like, I'm totally a game developer. So working in theater turned to working in live events, turned to working in live events

with mobile phones. And then when did that go digital? What happened? Well, 9-11 did. Jane had just moved to San Francisco a few weeks before after living in New York for six years. Something weird that happened while we were processing all of that was that an online community of gamers that we'd been a part of earlier that year playing this online game

called the AI Web Game. It was very collaborative. You're like 40,000 people on one team all trying to solve the same puzzle. I mean, kind of like early Reddit in a way, like everybody's trying to solve the same problem using message boards. And that community came back to the message board even though the game had ended a couple months earlier and they were like, can we solve 9-11? I mean, we wasn't even called that yet, but like, can we solve this?

Can we figure out what happened when it started to emerge that it was a distributed terrorist network? They're like, great. We're a distributed network of collective intelligence. We can understand how they might think or operate. We can figure out what security holes they snuck through. And they started to want to use their game skills to help. And that was really interesting to me because I was feeling powerless and everyone around

me was feeling like just like frozen. And here's this online community of people saying, wait, we are super collaborative, super collective intelligence. We save the world in this game. It would be stupid not to try to use those skills to help when the world really needs it. And that desire, that was literally the day I'm like, I think maybe I should study video games and gamers and how they collaborate instead of how physicists do because I wanted

to find out like, is this delusional? Is this crazy wishful thinking because we're also overwhelmed? Or are there problems that gamers could solve? And are there questions they can investigate and ways that they could use their skills in real life? And eventually I started designing digital games just to see if I could be the person to come up with that bridge. I'm going to make a game that has real problems in it so that gamers can test out this hypothesis

that they have. How did they do with their research into 9-11? It morphed pretty quickly into trying to be of service. So what wound up actually practically happening was getting people out to donate blood and volunteer. So it became sort of more like community mobilization, but the same group of people then started investigating things like government corruption and cold cases and they created a kind of spinoff site called Collective Detective.

And so they kind of continued to play with this and see what they could do over the next couple of years. And that was really when I started designing games, those are the people who showed up first to play. So side note, I went to go look up Collective Detective and the website has no pages, there's nothing to click. Simply the text, Investigating the Mysteries of Austin, Appointments by Referral Only. So I'm both spooked and intrigued.

Do you have a favorite game that you have designed? Oh, of course. I mean, when I think the one that's nearest and dearest to my heart would be Top Secret Dance-Off. I don't know if you are familiar with this one. So I have not played Top Secret Dance-Off as it gained huge popularity almost 10 years ago, but it's not in the App Store, unlike her other hit games, Super Better. I have Super Better, of course, but yeah, more people played Super Better than Top Secret

Dance-Off because I actually had to shut it down after about six months because it was taking over the player's lives and I just could not handle the average time spent in the game. It was about six hours a day, which was, it was too much, but so the idea behind the game is, let's say you want to dance, but you're shy, like this is, a lot of my games are based on my own problems, like you really want to dance, dancing is great for you, it feels good, but you're super shy, maybe if you could dance in disguise, then it would bring out like the Top Secret dancer in you.

So the premise of the game was you start the game by creating your avatar, which is not a digital avatar, it's a disguise that you put on in real life, and you introduce yourself to the community by doing the first dance quest, which is to dance without moving your feet. So this introduces your avatar, which like people were wearing like masks and wigs and I mean, just amazing, just invented the most beautiful characters, and then there's a series of dance quests that you unlock, like dance upside down and dance on a crosswalk, and then you power up with things like plus one creativity and plus one coordination and plus

one courage, and the points were given to you by other players, this is 2009, so people became like essentially like today's Instagram stars, but like for, but for being characters and dance videos, and you didn't know who these people were, but I have since had the opportunity to meet many of these people in real life and they're amazing, but it got really popular in weird places, like it was super popular in New Zealand for a while, and I went down there to give a talk and like all the morning shows had me on TV and they're like film crews following me around, like it was a weirdly popular thing in New Zealand, but what I loved about it is because you got all your points from other players and you

could only give people positive feedback, and if you gave them a point you had to explain why. So it's just like you post a video and then you'd have a hundred comments from people giving you points in these really amazing strengths and also saying wonderful things about you. I've never seen so much just love and people expressing themselves and finally anyway eventually shut the game down because it just like got out of control and I was self-funding it and it was, you know, I'm not an entrepreneur, so I mean I probably should have tried to

get VC funding or something, but I just shut it down instead. It seems like a lot of your games have really amazing intentions to change the way people live or think. So after designing a bunch of games, including Cruel to Be Kind, I Love Bees, The Lost Ring and of course Top Secret Dance Off, Jane was working in her home office and she stood up quickly. She hit her head on an open cabinet door and suffered a concussion, which must have hurt like a bitch so bad.

Now recovery was really rocky and she ended up developing her huge game Superbetter to help others dealing with anxiety and depression and recuperation. So for more on this, you can see her TED Talk, which was ranked in the top 20 most engaging TED Talks, one slot higher than Bill Gates' TED Talk, just saying. And so how far into game development did this happen and can you tell me a little bit about Superbetter and about kind of your recovery with that and how it made you look at games? Yeah, so this happened in the summer of 2009. So this was actually after we've been doing Top Secret Dance Off for about six months

and I was in the middle of writing my first book on games. So I had sold the book and I had to write it and I was like halfway through it. And so I was already like totally persuaded that games bring out the best in us and games can change the world. I'd already finished my PhD. This was, I was well into this and writing the book on it. When I did get this concussion that, you know, it was supposed to heal in a few days and then it was supposed to be a few weeks and then it was supposed to be a few months and

it actually, I mean, it took years to feel essentially 100% again. But during that time, you know, I had to stop writing, which created a lot of anxiety because the book was due in a few months. I had to stop my other work because I couldn't think clearly. I had to stop running. I couldn't exercise at all because I was having so much vertigo and nausea with like even just moving my head. I couldn't socialize.

I'd like go out and even just being around like fluorescent lights would make me feel like I would, you know, essentially would fall over. And so I couldn't do anything. Doctors are like, you have to stop. You can't, you know, have caffeine because it's creating triggering symptoms. You can't play video games. It's triggering symptoms and on top of not being able to literally do anything. I also started to have serious depression, partly from not being able to do anything,

partly withdrawing from things like running and work and socialization. But also I learned later that, you know, one in three people with a concussion experience serious depression, and it seems to be part of the brain's way of protecting you, that it's very dangerous to get another concussion shortly after a concussion. It's called second impact syndrome and you can die. And part of what happens when your brain is trying to heal is it literally does not want you to like crawl out of the cave or get out of bed and want you to protect yourself and just sit, stay put until it's safe to go out in the world again.

The part of the brain that anticipates good things happening, by the way, I didn't know any of this at the time, right? I had to learn this because I'm like, why did my brain break? Why do I want to die? But I learned later that the part of the brain that anticipates good things happening and when it's sort of fired up and you're getting dopamine hits and your brain's saying, hey, go out there, get the thing you want. It's a good food that you're smelling or it's like your partner or your pet and you

want to hug or a lick and it gives you energy and focus. That part of the brain just says, no, thank you. I don't want to imagine anything good happening because I want you to stay in bed and let your brain heal. How amazing is this? Okay. Also, content warning, Jane went through some pretty tough times following her concussion and we talked a little about suicidal ideation after brain injury, which was something I knew

nothing about because people just don't talk about it. When that part of the brain doesn't fire, you get really depressed and even suicidal because you literally cannot imagine anything good happening. Your brain just says, no, I'm not going to let you picture that. I learned kind of after all of this was happening to me, that's part of why suicidal ideation is so common in traumatic brain injury because it's a very natural response to, it's a rational response to not believing that anything could ever happen, that would be good, that nothing will ever make you happy and somehow through all of this, the fact that I did research

into how games affect our psychology and our brain gave me one kind of holy grail aha moment like maybe I can force my brain back into believing that good things can happen as a result of my own efforts and attention, which took me years of researching after the concussion to put all the pieces together, but it turns out that's the fundamental neuroscience of gaming. Your brain says, hey, something good could happen. You could go further in the game, get a higher score, you could get an advantage on your opponent if you take an action, if you make a decision and that part of the brain that

believes something good could happen and gives you energy and focus and optimism, it goes nuts when we play games, that's like the signature finding of FMI research on video gaming. So the premise for the work that Jane did was trying to bring a gameful mindset to things like recovering from traumatic brain injury or depression or anxiety and she went on to develop the thank you game for Oprah and Jane has said that she's secretly curious about how games can develop the seven positive traits that Buddhists believe can help end suffering.

So what are those traits? I had no idea. Mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, relaxation, concentration and equanimity. So how do we go from game playing to a more chill, happy brain? And I asked this for the sake of my own brain selfishly. Can you tell me kind of how games change the way we think or what happens in the brain? What happens to dopamine and serotonin? Like what's going on?

Wasn't that brain-y soup? Yeah. Okay. There's like so much I want people to know about this and there are two big pieces and so I want to tell both of them because not everybody like benefits from playing video games. Like for some people it can become almost like pathological. It takes them out of reality.

It takes them out of their social relationships and their goals. So I want to preface what I'm going to say by this doesn't naturally happen for all people like the good things and there are ways that you can if you don't have a good relationship with gaming that you can change it so that you're more likely to get the benefits. So I just want to preface all this by saying it's not like games are some magic pill that you play them and good things happen to you. It really depends on how you play and why you play that good things can happen for a lot of people.

Just allow me to reiterate that disclaimer. Games are not a magic pill and not everybody benefits from video games especially if you have a pathological relationship to them however they can really help in the following ways. So the signature thing that I would say as probably the person who has studied I mean I don't think there's ever been a scientific paper written about video games that I've not read. Thousands of them.

I am on it. We're all counting on you. I would say this sort of signature finding has to do with self-efficacy. So self-efficacy is the belief that you have the ability to take actions that can help you achieve your goals right and that so you have skills, you have resources, you have pathways forward and different people have different kinds of self-efficacy like I might have a lot of self-efficacy as a cook in the kitchen but maybe not in my fashion like sense of like what should I wear today.

I'm just not feeling like I have a lot of talent in that area. Different people have self-efficacy in different areas but if you have the experience of gaining self-efficacy in new areas it can develop a kind of mindset that does translate. So if you are often doing things that you're bad at and then stay with it and get better and suddenly you have new skills and you acquire new resources and you have achieved new goals and milestones your brain gets better at looking at a difficult skill or task and saying let me try it because I have a great and long history of getting better at things that I'm bad at and that's what gaming does for most people.

Games are designed to be hard the first time we play them. They are ridiculously challenging I mean you think about a game like golf where the goal is to get a small ball and a small hole and it is such a bad method to achieve that goal like to stand really far away from the hole and then use like a stick it's stupid. You've got to make the game a little bit easier. Why would we do that to ourselves? We do it because we want that experience of being bad and then getting better and having to use creativity and use practice and determination and learning from others and so all games

are like that whether it's Candy Crush or Pokemon Go whatever it is you get better over time and the more different games you play the more your brain gets used to being frustrated hanging in there feeling optimistic in the face of setbacks and that is the one generalizable positive impact of games that we see no matter what kind of game you play sport challenging cooperative board game you're playing bridge you're playing a video game if we can help you get comfortable with not being good at something trying using your skills and ability to get better at it and then you do in fact get better that that can translate to the rest of your life that's the that's a lot of my work has been helping people one make

sure you're always playing different games like the person who always plays mind sweeper or solitaire like even playing it for 30 years not not having this benefit you gotta try Fortnite or something like you gotta expose yourselves to interfaces you don't understand and communities that are totally strange to you so that you're you're always learning and improving go tell Gramps get on a headset go play Call of Duty she's gonna love it she's gonna love it so some people really benefit to a point but when you look at the research literature the people who really benefit from this experience are people who feel like games are real in a way like they don't see them as escapists they don't play games to ignore

their problems or like shove down negative feelings or get away from people who are annoying them those people tend to not benefit because they see games as separate from reality so they don't bring the same mindset to real life and those are the type of players who go on to be like when you would call it addicted it's not quite an addiction but it's a kind of compulsive gameplay where they play more than it's good for them and they feel like they just have to keep playing because everything else is so terrible people who can answer the question like what does it take to be good at this game what have you gotten better at since you started playing this game and can talk about it in a way that's bigger than

just the game such as for example I'm a good communicator under stress with my teammates or I'm really good at thinking of different approaches to a problem I don't just try one way I try lots of ways whatever it is that you think it needs you need to be good at if you can talk about that you tend to start bringing those skills to real problems and so like if you're a parent or you're a partner of a gamer or you're a gamer just answering those two questions can unlock essentially all the good stuff of games in reality not just while you're playing. So being a good communicator under stress and looking for ways to solve problems both

skills are aces it's weird how if in a video game shit starts hitting fans you can think logically or strategically you can overcome it but sometimes in life it's easy just to feel bogged down and you just want a lie face down on a carpet and be like not today life I am defeat but you can ask yourself hey if this were a game what would I do first off let's comb my avatar's hair I never thought about applying it that way that yeah it starts hard gets frustrating you get better at it yeah like Ali is there a game that you play I grew up with a lot of Atari Pong in like combat and like two pixels on a screen was the whole game it's funny because I feel like I don't play as many games as my peers and

I think instead I just use social media as a game for that same like reward and it's terrible oh but I know you can't because it's like all that has all the sort of sort of motivational aspects of games but it's not it's no we gotta get you off social media and onto Tetris 99 maybe if you like old school games it's like it's like you know a hundred people play Tetris against each other until there's only one survivor which means everybody loses so you don't I mean just just embrace it that's more what I need and it's funny my my boyfriend plays League of Legends and and my nephew and my nieces play Minecraft and what I find is that they play with their friends they play online so they hang out that

way and and I don't know it seems like is there a difference in games where you're playing against a computer versus you are in a community and your friends are on a headset and you're all yelling at each other trying to like you know kill it the same elf clearly I don't know what I'm talking about regarding League of Legends but I just looked it up and there are elder dragons rift heralds marksmen jungle monsters I don't know if any of those are elves anyway huge difference and it's not that one is better or worse or they're they're good for different things right so like if you're dealing with anxiety or depression a single player game is actually really good it because you can like pull out your phone

and play it for a few minutes because one of the benefits of games is that it can stop rumination right so if you're anxious you're anxious because you're imagining things that could go wrong right and it requires it requires your brain to be actively focused on visualizing things that scare you so one of the best treatments for anxiety in the moment is to just stop the ruminations to to make a conscious decision not to spend time and energy on these thoughts and so a game on your phone it could be like a mini golf game it could be you know candy crush it could be words with friends anything that you can play by yourself is fine because it stops the thought same with depression people depression ruminate on very negative

thoughts about themselves or their circumstances and if you can stop that flow of thought it's a it's an effective treatment so single player games are great and they are really helpful for things like anxiety depression and pain but social games are phenomenal for other things the quality of positive emotions they create the trust that they build it's interesting you mentioned League of Legends there's been great research showing that people who play League of Legends regularly have a stronger social support network than just about any other gamer meaning there are more people in their lives who will be there for them if they need advice if they need help in reality like help moving or you know assistance physical

assistance people play League of Legends very powerful social support system where the people they play with actually you know will loan them money there's something about the pattern building your heroes together and depending on each other to show up for your practicing or for your matches and so that's really interesting you mentioned that the kind of long term relationships we build online are really powerful and there's a term in game research and virtual reality research for one of the things that really heightens this which is presence a lot of these games have a really strong presence which means you feel like you are actually with someone that you feel like you were in the same physical space which brings us to

let's talk for a fortnight a fortnight has a phenomenal presence factor people who go hang out in fortnight now so like 200 million players out of nowhere everybody's playing fortnight yeah they feel like they are together and when we physically spend time with other people it's a much stronger bonding that happens because we take cues from body language and facial expression and the way that avatars are being designed and you can express yourself through dances and different emotes where you can really I mean your your avatar expresses emotion just like you do in reality it allows us to have a kind of bonding that I would say previously you would have needed to be in the same room with someone but we're

seeing both in just talking to gamers but also in the research literature that these games that have this very strong presence it does translate to a real social support system so online friends and in real life friends the gap is kind of closing both can offer social support and often hanging out online strengthens your real life bonds and that's all so precious and so wonderful but if you're wondering if there's a digital tipping point I asked about that like what happens if you're chasing dragons and then you're chasing the dragon the addictive nature of it or what's happening with dopamine and how that works and are we getting these like little hits kind of like gambling or kind of like yeah other pleasurable

things in our lives how's that working oh my gosh Ali there's so much to say here let me start let me start with the gambling question because this I think people if people can understand this it will alleviate a lot of anxiety around video gaming versus casino gaming the thing that happens in your brain where you feel like something good could happen as a result of your actions it is identical in gambling and video gaming right the part of your brain that says try again try again you might win go ahead go for it that keeps you at that slot machine or you just need to play another hand in gambling or you know make another bet yes that is identical to what's happening in video gaming but what happens in video gaming is you actually get better

at skills and you acquire more resources and you gain more allies who can teach you and help you and show you the way and as opposed to as you luck based gambling where you're just you know pulling the slot lever or scratching off a lottery ticket you can actually get better and improve your chances of winning in video gaming so it is a completely different psychological experience a different neurological experience because it is not delusional to stay engaged and that is a big difference between video gaming and casino gaming is that the games and casinos are designed for you to lose they are they want you to fail so they can take your money and it is delusional when your brain says stay engaged stay engaged bad that is that is ill social design and

shameful right in my opinion ps side note stay tuned for an episode on the lottery with a lethologist you don't believe old outward please see lotterycollectors.com or you can subscribe to the monthly newsletter the lethologist i've got an itch to cover it they can only be scratched by a dirty penny and a dream but that's a different episode in video gaming the games are designed for you to win and to get better and the developers are on your side and they want you to experience success and they want you to develop real skills and build real relationships that can help you succeed and that's the big difference so even though some of the neuroscience is the same the fact that you actually can improve in games and experience real meaningful development and

growth and relationship building it's a different application of that kind of neurological experience and so you know as we see games kind of spread into different areas of our lives i always say you know is this a good use of game design is it manipulating people to do things that maybe aren't in their best interest or is this actually a good use of game design it really depends on is there an opportunity for them to really improve and experience success and something that's meaningful to them maybe like fitness trackers are gamifying the steps you take and that actually is good for you and you can take more steps and that will have a virtuous feedback cycle where you feel healthier and now you're stepping more and then you're sharing with friends and it's

upward spiral take a sip of your beverage or blink twice if your brain is like my brain trying to remember where your Fitbit is and why you haven't charged it in months that's really good if you're using it just to get people to like buy more stuff or click on ads and how do you get better at clicking on ads i mean it's not a good that is not a good system and it doesn't lead to real growth and real relationship building so that's uh that's my philosophy on how you know even though it's the same a lot of the same stuff happening in the brain it really matters if there's an opportunity for growth and success and that actually brings me i have a ton of patreon questions can i ask you yeah so many questions and so this is kind of

like a lightning round okie doke so before the lightning round of questions from folks on patreon dot com slash allergies i tell you about a few things i like but before that each week a portion of the ad revenue goes to a charity or a cause that theologist chooses and this week jane picked able gamers dot org which works to make gaming accessible to all so in their words we give people with disabilities custom gaming setups including modified controllers and special assistive technology like devices that let you play with your eyes so you can have fun with friends and family and they're using the power of video games to bring people together improve the quality of life with recreation and rehabilitation so that's able gamers dot org doing awesome stuff so thank

you jane a donation was made to them now a few words from sponsors who make the podcast possible they're also all linked in the show notes ok back to your patreon questions which are good ones but that dovetails just wonderfully into one patreon question i got a ton from mark williams and from david baffa and from sasha kd they all asked about gamification and i know that i don't think that you love the word but um is the gamification of behavior a useful technique sasha k wants to know how do you feel about gamification of everything yeah um i you are awesome ali for knowing that i do not use a word gamification to describe my own work because just historically it's been used not in ways that authentically empower or bring the best out of

the people who are being gamified um so my philosophy is if you are connecting with somebody's deeply held values what do they want more of in their life they want to be a better parent they want to learn something new every day they want to be braver and get out in the world more be more physically active you know whatever it is that they authentically want to do that they choose for themselves if you can put a quest system or a leveling up system or a kind of cooperation opportunity where there are multipliers if you if you and your friends are doing it together you can add some game design elements that um help people do more of what they want and if they do it they're going to experience an upward spiral of skill and ability so they can

maintain it outside of the game that's an ideal situation for gamification you know i will i will say with my own uh game super better that's not a game i want you to play your whole life i want you to play it for a few weeks and then get that upward lift and kind of go back to reality and maybe come back next year if you need another upward lift we shouldn't be gamifying our whole lives in perpetuity right um we should use it as a way to give us that authentic experience of getting better at something that matters to us and then once we're better and we're doing it that authentic value and reward system will replace the need for a more artificial game one so if your aunt or your co-worker announces every time they hit their water

goal for the day don't hate the player hate the gamification and then a bunch of people call in Matthew Carla Kennedy Helen um Amy Connor all asked about dreams why do i dream of Tetris after playing Tetris for a long time two people in particular Colin and Amy both said i love Tetris but if i play it too long i start thinking about it all the time and when i close my eyes i literally see little tetromino swallowing why does this happen and is it a soviet mind control conspiracy just kidding on the last part um it is not first of all i could say having hung out with the original designer of tetris i will tell you he's super nice and headly and not it's not a secret soviet mind control mission so quick aside the creator of tetris was inspired by the

math game pentaminos which looks just like analog tetris also he is not an agent of soviet mind control his name is just alexi leonardovich petjevinoff and he's from Moscow so this is the greatest question because the other public service announcement i always like to do about video games actually has to do with tetris and how it takes over your mind um because um there have been three randomized control trials and uh studies and clinical trials now including one in the field with people who experienced traumatic events that show that the way that tetris takes over your brain so that you are flashing back to it um it can prevent flashbacks associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and there's actually an increasing usage of tetris within 24 hours of a traumatic

event if you were in a car accident maybe you witnessed um a violent act activity or you were a victim of violent activity that if you play tetris within 24 hours and before you go to sleep that your brain is more likely to flash back on tetris in the event which reduces the rate of traumatic flashbacks in the future and it happens because tetris is so visually compelling and requires so much visual attention that your brain essentially diverts resources from everything else and uh and and it works so hard on this problem that when you walk away from it your brain is continuing to work on it it's like it's when you give so much attention to a problem your brain thinks it's a priority essentially and so because tetris is so visually challenging

your brain essentially thinks like oh that's a priority i'm going to keep thinking about it when i walk away when i go to sleep and so in a way tetris is kind of like this miracle um even if you're not traumatized if you had a really bad day and you don't want to sit there thinking about it or like stay up all night thinking about it you can use tetris to block your brain from flashing back on an experience that you don't want to remember you use the power of tetris to flash back on tetris i mean i can't tell you since i started sharing this research i've heard from people who've been through really horrible terrifying things um who were able to get the game um on their phone and and play it and um felt like

they benefited and had fewer nightmares and flashbacks than they thought so um to your patrons who have observed this um they are correct and uh and it can be used in really powerful ways oh that's so amazing it's just like brb downloading tetris yeah can we have it i downloaded tetris immediately after this interview also this is going to be a whole aside about video game music and its origins and history and composition but in researching it i found out that the study of video game music is known as luto musicology for real for real there are experts all over the world who do this so yes you best believe this is on the list all in favor say bebop boop boop boop boop okay good okay i got a ton of questions also about

wait hold on i have so many so many different pages of questions it's crazy okay um i got a ton of questions about vr yeah like justin so uh dion dabolo kirana bergstrom and janelle york all wanted to know what video game advances should we look forward to like how do you see the industry developing and how does vr and ar change game design like virtual reality and augmented yeah oh so many things okay um i'll gonna focus on a few things um one thing one advance that we are going to see in gaming in general as a result of virtual reality i believe is that gaming will become a socially um safer and more pleasant space for people who have historically um experienced more harassment so for women people who are identified as queer there can be a lot of harassment

in social gaming and uh that's just a fact i spent a lot of time talking to vr developers and i know that all the major vr developers are very much focused on not repeating the mistakes of the past of both social media and video gaming they do not want vr to be a space where anybody can come up to you and tell you what they think anybody can come up to you and have an interaction with you what are you looking at butthead they want to invent new kinds of uh technologies for consent for who can see you who can touch you who can talk to you um i i'm very optimistic that vr is going to thoughtfully not replicate the um kind of toxic environments that we've seen in social media and video gaming in the past that's one thing like yay another thing that

i'm excited about in vr is vr esports um so there are um i mean esports is uh obviously becoming uh really popular and accepted i mean there are college scholarships there's college leagues there's um more people watching um online world championships for the the biggest you know league of legends finals then watched uh major league baseball world series and watched the nhl okay quick aside just to fact check this let's look at the most watched world series in recent years 2016 chicago cubs are in the world series for the first time since 1907 this is a big deal game seven who's gonna win the viewership is about triple what it usually is for a world series with 40 million people watching the chicago cubs take the victory 40 million oh but last year the number

of people watching the league of legends finals was a hundred million well that's an exaggeration it was 99.6 million so yeah that's a lot sorry cubs it's very popular but i'm interested in esports and vr because the esports and vr are often very physical um if you if you look at images or videos of them online you see people leaping and crawling and there's a real blend of physical sport but also all the things that require you to be good in video games and esports the kind of fast reflexes and visual attention and resource management that are the kind of strategic decision making that we see in traditional video games and esports so i'm excited for vr esports also as a as a way to have both real physical and beautiful gameplay alongside traditional esports skills

someone developed vr frogger but make it like mission impossible but ushering toads across freeways come on do for the toads a bunch of people also had questions about parenting and i know that you have twin four-year-olds so i'm sure this is gonna be a thing for you but um let's see matt sulgado karla hickenlooper uh rada vakaria karla kennedy and a few other people asked about addiction too um like when should people when should kids start playing video games and how much is too much okay so you cannot go wrong if you are playing the game with them that's that's the first and most important rule there's no too soon if you are playing with them and talking to them about it and for as long as you can continue this the better so even if it's a

single player game you know some of these they're building something in minecraft you are sitting right there you're like what are you doing how did you know to do that how did you figure that out like oh it looks really hard what's going on um talk to your kids let them express their problem solving process um what's motivating them about the game why is this fun you want to just draw out as much as you can um because it allows kids to really reflect on how they learn um what they're getting better at um how they are capable of solving difficult problems um and staying engaged with hard challenges um games are just the most incredible environment for you to validate your kids skills and abilities as a learner as a creative person as a problem solver so it's never too early

if you're playing with them um and at whatever age they are the more that you can reflect back to them what if they get annoyed with you they get annoyed with you if it's like a I mean you know if they're playing fortnite they don't want you asking them necessarily while while they're trying to like frantically build an escape route but afterwards talk to them i talked about dinner um and uh so that's that's the first and most important thing i some parents i'm going to tell me like oh games seem like kind of antisocial well they're probably talking to their friends on a headset or if you think it's antisocial just sit and play with them and you've successfully solved that problem and uh the other thing about in terms of timing um i i did help do a meta analysis of

all the studies that have looked at kids and adults how much is too much um and i will say that there have never been studies showing ill effects when people are playing less than 20 hours a week you do see impacts on school performance on social relationships with people who don't play games on physical health and well-being over 20 hours per week so that's just another kind of safe zone and you can say you know in our family we don't play more than 20 hours a week we just don't do that because that's what all the research says it starts to kind of interfere with other goals that you have or your physical well-being so we just don't do it and in cases of serious pathological gameplay when people are staying up all night they're not doing the schoolwork they're not looking for a job

i always say get it get it to 20 hours or less do not take the game away because if you understand the powerful effects of games on things like anxiety and depression and social support you know taking games entirely away from someone it's like pulling them off and antidepressant or an anti-xiety drug without tapering i looked up quitting gaming cold turkey and i did find a site called gamequitters.com which suggested taking in 90-day detox to reevaluate the role of gaming in your life it also suggested that during that time choose new activities schedule out your day and stay out of the house as much as possible so maybe it's a good idea to just record how much time you're spending on gaming if it's a problem and then as jane says

you can just taper off from there. There's really no need to take it away entirely it's about getting it to a safe number of hours so as an intervention if you need to intervene get it down to 20 hours a week and that is a much more effective strategy than trying to get somebody to stop playing. Oh that's so interesting i love that you've read every paper ever. And so a bunch of people asked about violence in video games. Emily Brabish, Anna Elizabeth, Janelle York, Lauren Murray, McKay, Sarah Jane James, Amber Cooper and then they all kind of asked do violent video games cause more violence? Is there any link between these ultra-realistic violent games? And then Don Daugherty Affleck said my husband is a lawyer so my question is

why does coming home from work and killing things in games like Dark Souls help him relax after a stressful day? Oh that's funny good Dark Souls is a very specific example that's like a almost like a masochistic game like it's very very hard. Okay PS I looked into this Japanese game of fortresses and knights and dragons and bonfires and moodily lit castle interiors to find a few things. One you can play as a person who has no skin which looks essentially like a human made out of salami killing things with a sword. Also it's widely considered one of the best and most difficult video games ever made like there's not even a pause button. There's no pause button they're like are you in this or are you in this? And so it's funny I mean

there's like some like high powered lawyer who like works really hard and then comes home and plays like literally the hardest game is uh it's definitely revealed something about that person's like personality they really um they really do like a challenge so violence okay look statistically we know that 96% of men under 21 play violent video games and I prefer to use the term like games with violent content because obviously the most violent game is like football real football where you are hitting people and causing brain injuries that is an actually violent game um video games are not actually violent so let's say games with violent content or aggressive themes everybody plays them and if you look at the data violent crime has gone down and down and down

exactly as engagement with violent themed games has gone up and up I mean it's like it's ridiculous if there were any any correlation let alone causation you would not see this trend this is like anybody who studies this will that's the first thing they will say is over the past 30 years violence crime goes down particularly in this demographic this male demographic it probably has to do with getting lead out of our paint um I mean that's you should do a good aside on that okay first off the fact that Shane listens to allergies and knows I do asides warms my heart to the point of bursting and also yes lead paint so according to an article on mother Jones that delves into the lead violence hypothesis they say lead poisoning degrades the development of

childhood brains in ways that increase aggression reduce impulse control and impair the executive functions that allow people to understand just the consequences of their actions because of this infants who are exposed to high levels of lead are more likely to commit violent crimes later in life so why is this brain scientists have done scans and found that because lead is really chemically similar to calcium it displaces the calcium needed for brain development so looking at the data is staggering you can see how the bands of leaded gasoline and lead paint correspond to these huge drops in violent crimes ps I have a victimology episode coming up and hell yeah we will be talking about that violent crime is going down violent themed gameplay is going up it's just not there's

no data to suggest that there is any kind of correlation let alone causation however that said two things there are certain types of gameplay that can turn you into a jerk not a violent person but somebody who has less empathy for people they perceive as weaker than them and who are kind of moodier and may yell at you or be grumpy to you and you're just like oh why are you so obnoxious or such a jerk that kind of gameplay is when you play in these very aggressive themed games against strangers who you don't know and will never see in person we tend to dehumanize those opponents we don't know who they are so we're playing anonymously online we're trying to beat them we build up in our mind that there's like horrible people and we hate them and we feel

antagonistic towards them and those emotions that we build up the frustration the anger the hatred it's not like you just walk away from the game and they evaporate so they can linger some people hypothesize that there's a kind of testosterone poisoning from this type of gameplay I mean poisoning is a little strong of a word but your testosterone gets jacked up and so yeah you're kind of a jerk so you shouldn't spend all your time trying to beat people you have never met and will never meet online you know esports is different because these are much more collegial environments you can play against the same people again and again and again you can see them in person at tournaments that's fine and another thought about violence in video games I don't

like to play games where I have to kill people I hate it when I play Fortnite I just hide and it's like literally a game of hide and seek for me and I build stuff and I like I've you know I can get a top five finish without killing anyone and to me that's awesome I don't like it I don't enjoy it there's a reason why a lot of people don't enjoy it like a lot of people don't want to simulate violence because we don't enjoy it and that's a natural feeling and it's why a lot of people are turned off by video game culture it's not abnormal to not enjoy violence like that's a that's also a normal thing if you're turned off by it that's okay and you don't have to play violent video games or if you play them you don't have to necessarily engage in the violent aspects of them

that is normal and that's fine and I personally feel the same way and this actually goes straight into Crystal Mendoza wanted to know what is the deal with Fortnite why is it so addicting is it the is it the killing part or is it that kind of feeling that you're hanging out with with friends like that social aspect yeah there's a lot of things that that is kind of special about Fortnite I mean one of the things is just how easy it is to try again so if you're in battle royale mode battle royale mode by the by is when a bunch of players play against each other it's like a birthday party but you die you play maybe you're dead in five minutes you can just play again you can drop back in parachute back down you don't have to you know wait for anybody

this this sense of like just abundant opportunity and how fast the games are and how quickly you can try again it really powers up the part of the brain that thinks that something good might happen and it's just like like oh something good didn't happen I'm out but wait I'm just gonna play again something good could happen now that that rapidity that sort of iterative nature of the game is really really wonderful and they've done such a good job with the expressivity of the avatars and how playful the different skins are and you just when you encounter people and you see what they're you know what their avatar is dressed as and you see the emotes that they do when something good happens you just kind of feel like you're seeing people it's it's really interesting people

feel like there's an authentic personality that they're able to express or an authentic emotion and it increases the sense of presence and increases the sense of social being and so so yeah the the social side of it is is really compelling too and I just think it's nice like to play a game where 99 people are going to lose and only one person wins it kind of takes the pressure off there can be a hundred people in the room and 99 don't believe in you I think it's easier for people to jump in and it's you know when you're playing chess one person wins one person loses you were the loser yeah and in the battle royale everyone's a loser so it's just it's a kind of a low-pressure environment where good things can can happen um what do you think about video games

in movies and tv is there anything that you've watched that you love or hate and stewart caswell wanted to know from a game designers point of view what are your thoughts on ready player one but yeah are there any anything in pop culture that gets it wrong and that you're excited about oh gosh okay well first of all every law and order episode on every franchise of law and order and csi and criminal minds has been terrible always never gets anything right well just obviously let's acknowledge that even though i like i love them all um and i watch svu every week um but ready player one is interesting because i had a strong visual reaction to the book that i still kind of feel which is i just don't believe it okay i was

maybe the last person on planet earth to know the plot of ready player one i just looked it up it takes place in 2045 the world is a desolate hellscape and then to escape that everyone just wears VR headsets but there's a real life game that happens that's all i'll say also wouldn't everyone get a ton of forehead zits from wearing a headset all the time in the future or would it even matter because you just see each other's avatars anyway is this our future i don't think that that vr is going to be the alternative to reality in that kind of really holistic way that ready player one imagines i think augmented reality is a much more likely future and that vr will be more often used for kind of short-term immersions um i love vr for example it's being

used in hospice care for people who still have like bucket list items but they're dying vr for kind of reliving past experiences when we get this really immersive 360 footage and you can kind of immerse yourself in in things that you've experienced in the past like i think i just don't buy the vision of ready player one i just don't i don't see that that's what people want um it's kind of going back to research my phd research methodology was largely ethnography of really trying to understand what drives people and sit with the communities and sit with individuals and look for patterns that that help explain how a society might evolve when you see a lot of the same thing bubbling up as a motivation and desire in different communities and so

i just don't buy ready player one as a vision i think it's going to be augmented if you look at what happened with pokemon go and how they were able to get almost a billion users in just a few months no product has ever scaled as quickly like including the wheel like more humans used pokemon go faster than anything that's ever been invented um anything that gives us a better glimpse into what the future of gaming will be like um people like pokemon go because you could still see the world and you could still have face-to-face contact with other people and you could be physically active which feels good and get fresh air and all of that so that's my feeling about ready player one i don't i don't think we're headed towards that future and uh i'd love to see

like ready player two should be about the augmented reality version of that world and it might be a better one i asked jane if she watched russian doll on netflix in which natasha leon is a game designer jane says she didn't watch it because it might feel like work to her and stress her out i mean not unlike fortnite it's kind of a birthday party oh wait i am not a cockroach last two questions if we have a second yeah is that cool the thing that you hate the most about video games or your work the shittiest thing about what you do most annoying can be anything oh god the most annoying thing is uh i mean it's just that i i hate the shame around gaming that is perpetuated by the media and to some extent by anxious parents um i it makes me crazy and uh i think we need to

stop shaming people for loving games because we've loved games since we were human beings though some of the oldest artifacts in the world are game boards and game dice and we need to stop creating unnecessary shame around this because it hurts people and it affects their self image in really damaging long-term ways so that is the most annoying thing about games is the shaming and and the media um has a big role to play in it and i we need to stop it video games they seem to have captured america's imagination and its pocket change as well that's legit um what is your favorite thing about video games or about what you do i mean my my favorite thing is i love with discovering a new game with my husband still um we've been together since uh

2000 um so almost 20 years now and one of the first things we did together was play an adventure game called grim fandango one player's uh lucas arts uh browser eight's game you like explore world together and we spent a few weeks playing it together and i still like i love when a new game comes out whether it's gone home game or a fortnight we can sit and experience it together and we have these sort of memorable moments in our history i'm like when we found portal when we found braid when we found world of warcraft i really love developing a skill with him together and having that that novelty and that exploration and curiosity there's so many positive emotions that we feel when we play and when you can feel them with someone you love it's really

powerful and so i'm i'm always excited um when when we have time and opportunity to discover a new game together open up a beer and you say get over here and play a video game oh i'm now i'm gonna have to learn league of legends and download tetris yes good victory thank you so much for doing this i'm so glad i finally got to talk to you i feel like i've just told the line of creepy i'm like hi it's me again hi oh no and i wish you know what if i'd known that you would interview people like on a bench at lax also we could have done this a long time ago because that that is something that i often find myself so yes jane mcgonagall the woman the world needs so befriend someone and even if you have to do it over skype in a remote sound booth 400 miles away

ask smart people stupid questions because they have the keys that can unlock the easter eggs that can give you life more lives so find out more about jane mcgonagall at jane mcgonagall.com she's also avant game on twitter and i'll link all this in the show notes including the non-profit able gamers dot org and the sponsor links and jane's book once again is called super better a revolutionary approach to getting stronger happier braver and more resilient powered by the science of games and also dr kelly mcgonagall jane's sister is a psychologist who studies how to make stress your friend you better believe i'm gonna try to make her come on the show mcgonagall's y'all good folks so to find allergies you can follow allergies on twitter

and instagram at oligies and i'm ali ward with one l on both and for t-shirts with the oligies logo and mugs and totes and pins and hats all that is at oligiesmerch.com you can tag your instagram photos oligies merch so then i can repost them on mondays if you want uh thank you shannon feltis and bondy dutch for managing that thank you erin talbert and hannah lipo for admitting the facebook group full of great folks thank you to interns harry kim and kaleb patten to assistant editor jarrett sleeper of mindjam media and of course to the incomparable steven ray morris of the percast and c Jurassic right and also to nick thorburn who wrote and performed the theme music um if you stick around to the end you know i tell you a secret this week you get two

number one after my disgusting botfly video confession last week stegosaurus on instagram dm me asking if i'd ever seen videos of mango worms and then ruined my life because i watched so many it's so gross they make botflies just seem like child's play just don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it also my other secret is that i mentioned dating someone and for years and years i've been super low pro about who i'm dating because it's just a vulnerable thing and also what if it ends and then you have to explain that to people i just i just quiet about it anyway go get him kiddos you all mean so much to me bye bye you